Ave Atque Vale: A. W

by BOOTH TARKINGTON

ONLY three times during the nineteen years that I knew Alexander Woollcott did he speak to me of anybody so dislikingly that I’m now able to recall the incidents. Almost every year he came to visit me, often more than once and sometimes staying longer than a week; always he was in a condition of radiant enthusiasm over somebody or over some magnificent thing somebody had done.

He was catholic; the focus of his admiration might be a book, a play, a painting, a philanthropy, a college, or an orphan child, or an octogenarian lady or a fugitive Colonel or a miraculous dog or a Vermont cook or an eloquent scientist. All these were delightful marvels that in passionate generosity he wished to share with his friends. To make living pictures of them before you, he strained the language and exhausted himself with tensest acting. He struggled for supreme phrases — hushing his voice to utter them as if almost in awe, himself, of their great meaning.

Not long ago he seemed to become aware that he’d whispered “Incredible!” “Incredibly beautiful!” “Incredibly enchanting!” “Incredibly fantastic!” perhaps too often for good effect; he substituted “Fabulous!” instead. He didn’t love, he adored. The water of his New England lake was all sapphires and diamonds for him.

His life seemed a kind of rapture, his own kind. He was forever building up his own world about him, forever nimbly adding new brilliancies to its gay color, forever seeking new means to describe its incomparably sparkling charms so that everybody to whom he talked might at least partly live in it with him.

He saw people as “characters” — concentratedly Woollcott characters — and he collected them as hungrily and triumphantly as some connoisseurs collect objects of art. His own character was a part of his collection and amused him profoundly. Sometimes it staggered him a little, too; for he never knew into what it might not carry him. The field of inaction and rest was the only place to which it could never lead him.

Burdened with ills of the flesh, he made them a comedy, and, like a Prince on a Progress scattering largesse, tossed gold about him sweepingly. Once he came here, to Indianapolis, had a thousand dollars for an hour’s talk and gave part of it to The Seeing Eye and the rest to a local school of which he knew nothing except that some good people were struggling to maintain it.

He had the air of living in public privately, insisted upon being accepted as himself rather than as a mere celebrity; and upon the platform or before a microphone, or even to some extent upon the stage, he was still confidentially himself, as if inviting his audience to be as humanly intimate with him as he was with it. Thus people who knew him in only his public capacities really knew him pretty well and so, in multitudes, would now miss and mourn him much as his friends do. He had no aloofness; on the contrary, desiring to be no mystery himself, he sought to find and disclose the heart of every mystery that other people were. Probably this is the reason that he took such long delight in Miss Lizzie Borden and was always enchanted by intricate crime, whether it was real or only in the books.

Sometimes — always in nervous haste, I think — he verbally snubbed people. Nevertheless, in what he felt for all but comparatively a few of the human beings he encountered in his passage to that bourne whence no traveler returns, Abou ben Adhem had little on him.

. . . He had such unction in living, such love of life and such buoyant ecstasy in the very life he led that only death itself, and never the imminent threat of it, could change him. It is easy to fancy him now waking a little confusedly in the undiscovered country; then promptly finding himself and at once hastening to find others — to seek out Mr. Justice Holmes and tell him all about Dr. Eckstein, to discover Mrs. Fiske and tell her all about Mrs. Roosevelt. I think he would look up Mr. and Mrs. Borden and ask them exactly how much they remember about what happened to them; but perhaps, and almost before doing anything else, I think, he would rush to Alice Duer Miller, who would know nearly everything, to inquire where Charles Dickens lives.